Solved two drives, two vistas

I recently bought a new 1tb hard drive for my pc and installed windows vista ultimate 64-bit software with service pack 2 on it. it's working like a charm. now it's time to reformat my old 500gb drive with my other version of windows, home premium 32 bit. I was going to use it for storage but a lot of the programs i want to use don't work with 64 bit software, or if they do it's early beta stages. (Music production software)
my question is...

What is the easiest way to select which hard drive to boot up to? they're both SATA. I just don't want to go into my computer and plug one in and unplug the other. I also don't want to try and catch my bios menu every time i start up my computer to switch boot priority. Is there some kind of boot screen where i can choose what hard drive i want to load without having to go into my bios? kind of like a log in screen with different user accounts where i can choose one or the other...

thanks for reading.

p.s. i would usually just try google or the search here, but i'm not even sure what i'm tallking about would even be called, so any help is appreciated!

Hello gunsxofxsummer,

If you leave both internal drives connected and install the 32-bit Vista on the other drive, then you can just dual boot normally. When you start or restart the computer you will be able to select what OS you would like to start in the "Advanced Boot Manager" screen at boot.

The tutorial below can help show you how to. It's the same steps, but just substitute Windows 7 for your 32-bit Vista instead.

Dual Boot Installation with Windows 7 and Vista - Windows 7 Forums

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/117366-clean-install-full-version-vista.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Excellent! thank you very much that's exactly what i was needing!

You're most welcome.

So i just done a fresh install of vista home premium on my 500gb drive and tried the dual boot but i didn't get the Boot Manager screen. it just went straight to my new drive when i boot up. i changed my 1tb drive to primary and it done the same. no Boot Manager screen, just goes straight to gui screen. and ideas?

You might try a startup repair for the missing OS to see if it may be able to fix this for you. You may need to run it up to 3 times though.